Sandy's Speed Reduced Danger To Vermont

Winds from Tropical Storm Sandy were strong enough to bring down power lines and leave thousands of Vermonters in the dark, but the high winds weren’t as widespread as feared.

Scott Whittier is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Burlington. He spent the day Monday tracking weather from the state’s Emergency Operations Center.

Whittier says as Sandy approached the coast it surprised forecasters by picking up speed, which helped reduce the danger to Vermont.

"By moving quickly like that the wind field still stayed out of the east northeast, aloft at 3 to 4,000 feet and that is not normally a direction where we usually get our widespread wind events," Whittier explains.

Whittier says there were still significant gusts of wind in Vermont, but they were not as strong as they could have been.

"It has done its stuff but it very well could have been a magnitude or more stronger and we lucked out," he says.

More than 20,000 Vermonters were without power for at least part of the storm, due to the winds. The greatest concentration of outages occurred in Vermont’s four southernmost counties.